1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology for assessing the image quality of scanned images.
2. Description of the Related Art
Paper documents (manuscripts) are read with a scanner (scanned in) in order to convert them to electronic form and use, or save, as scanned image data. Furthermore, after scanning in a document made up of characters and converting it to image data form, the image data is subjected to character recognition processing in order to obtain text data indicating character codes. Because text data is superior in terms of processing, re-writing, and searching, it is extremely useful when converting paper documents to electronic form. However, due to the fact that the scanning process involves paper, whenever the paper has physical defects, such as “folding” and “bending”, and there occur the so-called “scanning errors”, part of the information contained in the paper document is lost in the scanned image obtained by scanning the document. In such a case, the paper document has to be re-scanned, but the decision as to whether the re-scanning is necessary has to be made by the user by visually checking the scanned image data.
The present invention was made with account taken of the above-mentioned circumstances and provides an image processing technology, in which localized image quality deterioration due to folding and bending. of paper can be assessed based on character recognition results.